Why did Yahoo Join Microsoft?

We all know Microsoft has been trying to buy Yahoo for some time now, the first news surfaced last February, when Microsoft offered to buy all of Yahoo for $40 billion. Last summer, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo’s search business for $1 billion.

A couple of months ago, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said it would take “a boatload” of money to get her to sell Yahoo’s search business to Microsoft. But just around a month back Yahoo gave into Microsoft philosophy of “Buy it, if you can’t buy it join it and if you can’t join them copy it”. So why did Yahoo Join Microsoft, yes we all know the official version, that they have joined hands to fight the bigger evil called Google.

We all know how big a corporation Microsoft is, but its web presence has been diminishing over the years, Microsoft’s repeated attempts at the search engine, has been met with repeated failures. While Google has been growing year after year and pushing Microsoft barrier. So it’s understandable Microsoft wanting to join hands with someone who could help it push Google out of the way. But that still doesn’t explain Yahoo’s sudden decision to join hands with Microsoft.

A simple comparison between Bing and Yahoo, shows how far ahead Yahoo is of Bing.

Source: wolframalpha.com

Could recession have taken such a beating on Yahoo? The stock prices have fallen to 14.7995USDthe last I checked. Could Yahoo be avoiding an impending crisis?

Souce: Yahoo Finance

If you take a test at a search engine comparator, http://www.haklus.com , you will be surprised, how often you might end up choosing Yahoo Search Result as the preferred result. So I guess only Yahoo can answer why it had to sign up with Microsoft.